In hospitals and other clinical settings, healthcare providers may use medical instruments such as test strip readers or analyte monitoring devices to perform diagnostic tests on multiple patients. Current infection control protocols require that the healthcare provider clean the medical instrument between each use or between each patient. This can mean that a particular medical instrument may cleaned thousands of times within the course of a year. It is even possible that a medical instrument may be cleaned tens of thousands of times within its service life.
A typical cleaning and disinfection protocol may require a number of steps. For example the healthcare provider may first clean the medical instrument to remove visible contaminates from its exterior surface. Next the medical device may be disinfected using a disinfecting liquid or a textile impregnated with the disinfecting liquid. After this the medical instrument is allowed to dry.
A challenge in cleaning such medical devices is that fluids used for the cleaning and/or disinfecting steps can destroy electronic components or delicate instruments used for performing the diagnostic tests if such fluids enter into the interior volume of the medical instrument, e.g., via the test element port. Ports used to insert biological samples or test elements or test strips not only need to be sealed against these fluids, but they also need to be able to be reliably sealed for tens of thousands of cycles.